5/22/12

Heavy Rain

"But when I was
there it was strange – I suddenly had this feeling that everything was
connected. It was like I could see the whole thing; one long chain of events...
It was like a perfect pattern laid out in front of me and I realized that we
were all part of it, and all trapped by it."

According to the summary biography on the back
cover of his detective novel Good Night, Sheriff (1941), Harrison R. Steeves was a professor of English at Columbia College who moonlighted as a
literary-legal consultant and appeared in a number of settlements over literary
property in that capacity. He wrote his sole detective story after he had
recuperated from an unspecified illness and the book was published on his
sixtieth birthday. The inspiration for the book came when he was on the road to
recovery, which was paved with dozens of mystery novels, leaving him convinced
that he could pull a better trick and I'm glad to report that it wasn’t half
bad – making me somewhat curious as to whom Steeves had been reading when his
sickness bound him to his bed and books.

Good Night, Sheriff
sets about several weeks after the unfortunate passing of Mrs. Agnes Earlie,
wife of Dr. Thomas Earlie, who was found dead in an open clearing alongside the
road soaked from the torrents of rain that followed in the wake of an
unseasonably sultry day in early November – felled by a bullet to the head. The
general consensus is that Mrs. Earlie was accidentally hit by a "lost bullet"
from a hunter's rifle, after all, it had happened before many years ago, but
the insurance company who has to cough up twenty grand to Agnes Earlie's dying
sister, Olivia, have their doubts and send Dr. Patterson to Mercer to look into
the matter.

Dr. Patterson is also the story's narrator and
interestingly enough, he was nameless for the first quarter (or so) of the book
and this raises an interesting question: was he meant to be a nameless
detective? Steeves dedicated the book to everyone who provided him with
criticism and this effectually "knocked about, chopped, kneaded and hackled"
the plot until it was in its present form, which, once again, according to
Steeves himself, differed quite a bit from the first fair copy of the book. I can
easily imagine one of his proofreaders suggesting that an anonymous narrator puts
a distance between the character and the reader. The name Patterson is
mentioned only a dozen or so times over the course of two-hundred-and-fifty
pages and it sometimes struck me as if the name was wedged in between the text
as an afterthought.

Nevertheless, Patterson proves himself to be an
excellent, semi-official investigator as he sifts through the evidence,
building up theories and talks with the people who are involved (like a local
woodsman and the victims brother-in-law) – making this a very slow-moving and
mostly sedentary detective story. No car chases and shoot-outs between the
pages of this crime novel. Heck, the final seventy pages basically consist of
one long conversation between Patterson and the person he tagged as the
murderer. It's a fascinating accumulation of chapters, in which clues (both
physical and psychological) are analyzed and form a "Prison of Logic" around
the suspect. This even yields an unusual, but satisfying, motive for murder and
this would've ended the book on a high note, but Steeves made an amateurish
mistake when he attempted to spin a final twist that would turn the case
up-side down.

In a final conversation with the Sheriff of
Mercer, Patterson and the reader suddenly learns that everything they know of
the murder also fits another, more inconspicuous, character and that's just a
flat-out cheat! Was I surprised? Yes. Was I pleased? Not really. A cheap "surprise"
like that felt unworthy of such a cerebral detective story. Still, if you can
look past the final ten pages and you enjoy this kind of slow moving unraveling
of a plot than it might be a book that could interest you. But be warned, this
is not a book you are likely to finish over the coarse of a day or two. Somehow,
I began to read slower and slower as I left one chapter after another behind
me. It took me nearly a week to reach the final quarter.

2 comments:

I've known about this book for several years and have been intending to buy a copy. But now I think I'll wait until it shows up in a library sale for less than a buck. I've had my fill of the "sedentary" slow-moving detective novels from this era. It may be include a cheat but it's not as bad as the one in FOOTPRINTS.

You know, the solution could've worked if it was given in an epilogue, unbeknownst to Dr. Patterson, who leaves Mercer under the impression that he was 100% correct, which would've made that final conversation with the sheriff unnecessary.

The epilogue could've been the sheriff seeing Patterson off, staring dreamily at the departing train, as we board his train of thoughts to learn what actually happened.

You could even improve this by swapping the supposed murderer from the false solution with the actual murderer (with the former putting up a front of guilt to protect the latter, who's revealed in the epilogue). It's not perfect but better than the sheriff as a deus ex machina.

And the solution of Strahan's Footprints was more a sloppy mess than an outright cheat.

The Usual Suspect

An Elementary Observation

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants.

Witnesses' Statements

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre)."The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).